Fecundity, Fertility Control, and Feminist "Alliances"

In Eugenic Feminism Asha Nadkarni explores the links between feminist movements in the United States and India as they intersected in the domain of nationalist reproductive politics and activism. Through a close reading of the public positions and practices of key figures such as Margaret Sanger, Rama Rau, Sarojini Naidu, and Indira Gandhi, she attempts to reframe debates over reproductive rights through the longue durée of the rise of eugenic and population control politics in both the United States and India. Rather than focus on the interceding effects of the British Empire, Nadkarni argues that Indian developmentalism primarily was informed by American policies and models; therefore examining the linkages between the two nations offers insight into how feminist movements were informed and coconstituted by activities, imaginaries, and politics related to eugenics and reproductive control in both sites. Her study begins by examining the conjoined histories of the rise of "negative eugenics" that underscored the urgency of limiting the birth of the "unfit" in India and elsewhere, as well as "positive eugenics" that promoted family planning as the solution to achieving national development and modernity in the postcolonial period. Through these links, Nadkarni seeks to demonstrate how reproductive politics and the movement for birth control, both of which have been closely linked with the establishment of liberal forms of feminism, led to the production and circulation of less-empowering discourses that were tied to notions of contagion, security, and control over populations.

By examining archives ranging from utopian and nostalgic fiction to political speeches and planning documents, as well as other kinds of texts, Nadkarni considers how nationalist feminisms in both India and the United States were conjoined in their projects of promoting and spreading reproductive nationalism during the height of the developmentalist population control era from the 1920s to the 1970s. As Carole McCann (2016) and others have suggested, this period also saw the allegorical and technocratic construction of the ticking "population bomb" that raised the specter of demographic doom, while also erasing women's embodied experiences from the management of abstract populations. The rising tide of fear surrounding an impending population explosion in the Third World, along with fears over a "subpar" national population growing in the West, imbricated colonial and postcolonial nationalist projects of governmentality. As Nadkarni shows, those fears also shaped feminist discourses of reproductive autonomy, as eugenic discourses undergirded nationalist and transnational feminist projects related to women's bodies and health.

The book's five chapters engage such topics as Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Moving the Mountain (1911), Herland (1915), and With Her in Ourland (1916); the Indian reformer Sarojini Naidu's speeches and poetry; debates over Katherine Mayo's Mother India; and fictionalized accounts of Indira Gandhi's Emergency period. The epilogue moves into the contemporary moment to discuss transnational surrogacy, a topic that has garnered a great deal of contemporary feminist consideration. Rather than delve into a specific historical event, the book uses these scattered moments to build the case that US and Indian feminisms have been implicated in promoting feminist activism that centers the reproductive body as the site for national development, over other configurations of autonomy or freedom. In doing so, this brand of feminism also reinforces a transnational hierarchy whereby women in India represent "the overly sex-differentiated, fecund and tradition-bound oppressed woman who serves as an object lesson for white U.S. feminist advance" (207).

At many points, the book covers familiar terrain: for instance, Mrinalini Sinha's Spectres of Mother India (2006), Manoranjan Jha's Katherine Mayo and Mother India (1971), and Joanna Liddle and Shirin Rai's "Feminism, Imperialism, and Orientalism: The Challenge of the 'Indian Woman'" (1998) all closely examine the immediate and lasting impacts of the publication of Mayo's infamous Mother India. Nadkarni's discussion certainly adds a different veneer to these accounts through her argument that Mother India signals not just a call to protect US and British imperial interests in South Asia, as Sinha and others have convincingly...